Even better and where it matters more. This time the 1TB KC3000 beats its 2TB sibling and turns in the second-best performance we've seen to date. Outstanding. 3DMark SSD Gaming Test This SSD is designed for use in desktop and notebook computer workloads and is not intended for Server environments.

Compact M.2 design fits easily into small-form-factor (SFF) systems, desktops and laptop PCs. Low-profile graphene aluminium heat spreader. The Kingston KC3000 looks great on paper, but how does it really perform? I ran a bunch of tests using an ABS Challenger (ALI589) with Intel B560 chipset on a Gigabyte DS3H motherboard, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM, and 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11400F CPU. Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD delivers next-level performance using the latest Gen 4x4 NVMe controller and 3D TLC NAND. Upgrade the storage and reliability of your system to keep up with demanding workloads and experience better performance with software applications such as 3D rendering and 4K+ content creation. With formidable speeds of up to 7,000MB/s read/write, it ensures improved workflow in high-performance desktop and laptop PCs, making it ideal for power users who require the fastest speeds on the market. The compact M.2 2280 design fits seamlessly into motherboards and gives greater flexibility where high-power users appreciate responsiveness and superior loading times.

Unsurprisingly, Kingston quotes their new KC3000 drive with a pretty impressive performance profile with read and write speeds of 7GB/s and 7GB/s, respectively, for the 2TB and 4TB models. Random 4K performance is quoted to reach up to 1 million IOPS for both reads and writes. These numbers are exactly what the Phison E18 controller indicates it tops out at. When it comes to benchmarking storage devices, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparison between competing solutions. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, to trace captures from different VDI environments. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. Our testing process for these benchmarks fills the entire drive surface with data, then partitions a drive section equal to 5% of the drive capacity to simulate how the drive might respond to application workloads. This is different than full entropy tests which use 100% of the drive and take them into a steady state. As a result, these figures will reflect higher-sustained write speeds. Our 1TB KC3000 sample absorbed 369GB of data at a rate of 6,050 MBps before degrading to roughly 1,015 MBps for the remainder of the test. Unfortunately, the KC3000 did not recover any of its SLC cache during the idle recovery rounds, but its write speed measured roughly 1.9 GBps instead of 1 GBps. Power Consumption and Temperature

For reliability, the KC3000 has an MTBF of 1,800,000 hours and an endurance rating (total bytes written) of 1.6PBW for the 2TB capacity model. The latter value is noticeably lower than the Seagate Firecuda 530‘s 2.55PBW. It’s higher than Corsair though, which continues this inconsistent endurance spec on E18 SSDs.

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Estimated delivery times are provided to us by the respective delivery companies. We pass this information onto you, the customer. Switching over to sequential workloads, the new Kingston drive performed much better than all the other tested drives peaking at 105,888 IOPS (6.62GB/s) and 301µs latency. Though this didn’t quite make it to its top quoted numbers, it is still one of the fastest consumer drives we’ve seen in sequential reads. The Kingston KC3000 is the company’s latest premium SSD offering available in the industry-standard M.2 2280 form factor and in capacities from 512GB to 4TB. Specifically designed for enthusiasts and power users looking to get the most out of the new NVMe Gen4 interface, Kingston indicates that the KC3000 is best suited for 3D rendering and 4K+ content creation software applications.